Grief in the Days of Time Machines
*
That explains my claustrophobia, but there was also within me a deep dread of calamity—the swift and unexpected disaster that could befall one’s life in a split second. In a heartbeat. In what my mother called, quoting the Bible, the twinkling of an eye.
Only six months before the tragedy of that first Apollo and its crew, my then five-year-old sister Terri had been hit by a car. It was summer, and I was riding my bike around the neighborhood, waiting to be called home by the dinner bell. I had just turned down our street when I saw a large clot of people in the middle of the road. Grownups and children stood circling something on the ground. As I approached, I saw my sister’s red tennis shoe against the blacktop—and then I saw my sister. Terri was lying in the road, her face bloody, her arm at a strange angle, and her right ankle bent and bloodied, as well. She looked up at me, confused. She was struggling to sit up, and one of the neighbors was holding her down. “Be still,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
I saw my parents running toward us, my mother crying, my usually jovial father white-faced and frightened. I do not remember the ambulance coming, though I know it did. And I do not remember the teenaged boy whose car had hit her weeping and begging forgiveness, telling all who would listen that he had just gotten his driver’s license, though I know this happened, too.
What I recall is my grandmother dropping to her knees in the dining room that evening, her face falling into her hands. I asked what I should do, and Grandma looked up at me with wet eyes. “Pray,” she told me. And so I sank down to my knees beside her there, and we pleaded with God for my baby sister.
That she recovered, that she healed from the broken arm, the broken ankle—that the teeth that had been knocked through her upper lip were baby teeth, eventually replaced by new ones—was a consolation. But in the days long after that accident, what remained were scars: one above her mouth, running to the base of her nose; a jagged scar across the top of her foot; and one inside of me that would not go away. Now I knew the truth that I had not known before. Everything could be changed in a moment.
Claustrophobia. Calamity. And, finally, fire.
*
It was my mother who was the real worrier in my family, but my father was not without his anxieties. What plagued him most, I think, was the idea that his deafness would allow some sort of harm to come to his girls. And it was not just my sister and me who were “his girls.” That also included my mother and my grandmother. We were his beloveds. His charges. He had to do whatever he could to keep us safe. Daddy dreaded that my sister and I would cry out to him at night, and he would not know it because he could not hear us. He wanted us to be prepared for every possibility, every potential danger, that we might encounter. And so we were readied for fire.
First, there was the lesson in how to tie bedsheets together to make a rope. How to insure that the knots would hold; how to secure one end to a bedpost; how to use knots to create “steps” or handholds in the improvised rope to make our escape safe and sure. He demonstrated the way to test for the possibility of an exit through our bedroom door instead of the window. He dropped to the floor and scooted across it, keeping his face low to the ground. We were instructed to do the same. “Always stay near the floor,” he said. “Smoke rises. It will be safer to breathe close to the ground.”